Kulk’s new album ‘We Spare Nothing’ comes a year after the release of their dense and fuzzed out debut ‘here lies kulk’ and sees the band elevating their monolithic brand of doom and sludge. The album is available through Hominid Sounds on vinyl and digital.
The band comments:
“It’s a journey, we felt like a completely different people after making the album. You go up to space then down to the depths of hell, back into your own head and come out dead.”
The beauty of Kulk I have found, is their ability to keep you engaged with something as simple as waves of electronic feedback. The opening of first track ‘shuck’ shows that as it gently flows in on a wave of noise before the rock begins, sounding more like a disturbance to the sonic wave. The whole band clatter together with drums, guitar and vocals all sounding very compressed. The guitars themselves sound like they were recorded under water with the solo emerging from beneath the waves only to be claimed by them again.
The crushing ‘Forgetting Is Your Blessing’ is a torture or grinding guitars and pulverising drums. The track grinds on with minimalistic playing with Longdin just thrashing the chords out with an almost sinister edge. Something that ‘Goblin Dreams’ is affected with. The apocalyptic spareness with feedback drenched spoken vocals gives the track a very sci fi film soundtrack vibe.
‘Day Old Kebab’ is like a hangover is musical form. The torture continues with the feedback squealing on the intro and nonsense looped over pounding drums. the track is all light and airy compared to the next ear destroying track ‘Lives For One’
After the noise comes the calm as the album takes on a more solid sound. ‘My Old Man’ is possibly the most normal sounding song with gentle stroked chords over recognisably human vocals. Theres a melodic wave flowing through the track that sounds like a flute given the track a curiously hippie vibe. The sparse ‘Lone Individual’ is also a more normal sounding track albeit with its suspense filled chords that build to a distorted mess. It’s a track that has more space to it than some of the others on this album.
‘Kill Your Local Rapist’ a cool rock n roll riff which is quickly is disturbed by shouted vocals as the track fades out, ending the album far too early for me. I could listen to their brand of noise for the rest of the day. In fact the whole album becomes addictive when you are in the right mood. The compressed nature and brutal way each track is presented feels so right. An antidote to the over corrected and gentle nature of a lot of todays music.
Check out the track Shuck, below:
Find out more via the bands Facebook
Purchase the album here
